Fedora websites design status

While the Fedora Design team and Fedora Websites team along with the Fedora Board have been working towards a completely updated web presence for Fedora over the past couple of releases, I wanted to give a bit of a summary of what’s happened so far, provide you a bit of an update on our current status, and give you another avenue for providing feedback as well as solicit yet more feedback from you. 🙂

How well did this design work? So far, we’ve updated it once to account for the new crop of spins released with Fedora 13 (including the new Design Suite, wee!!), and I really haven’t heard any negative feedback about it besides folks simply not knowing about it. So we probably need to continue advertising it and socializing it, maybe even ramping those efforts up a bit more.

Phase II: get.fedoraproject.org

After the release of Fedora 12, we got to work on planning a revamp of the oft-complained-about http://get.fedoraproject.org page, the main page used in order to download Fedora every release. The main goal of the redesign according to the Board was, “To more effectively promote a single instance of Fedora that satisfies the computing needs of the average person.” It also needed to “Provide a clear route to the new Spins hub” and “Provide clearer instructions and links to support options.” The page should be designed for:

Primary Users

People who are somewhat computer savvy, but may be new to Fedora and/or Linux and FOSS in general

People who are not sure what they need to do in order to try Fedora

People who may not understand how to create and use Live media

Secondary Users

People who don’t know where to find anything other than the default offering (i.e., is there something else available?)

Page is not designed for

People who are currently and comfortably using Fedora

People who have pre-specified needs for the Fedora they download

People who know where to find non-default offerings, and want to pick from an a la carte-style or other expanded sort of list

Now, if you know the Fedora users I do, the main tension here should have jumped off your screen and nipped you in the nose by now – we have folks who are particular about the desktop they run, the arches they need to run it on, the format in which they’d like it (live media vs. DVD vs. initrd vs. net boot vs. preupgrade vs. pxe vs. ad nauseum 😉 ), and the download method (http, ftp, bittorrent, postal mail paid, postal mail free media, etc. etc.). This is a very complex matrix, and directly conflicts with having a simple one-click download.

Amongst readers of this blog, the vast majority of users download Fedora when a new release comes out. The time between releases can be considered a much lower-traffic time period for downloads.

By far, the most popular method of obtaining Fedora amongst blog readers is via the website, 46+15= 61% of users downloading directly from the website. The second and third most popular methods are bit torrent and pre upgrade, 19% and 18% respectively.

The DVD and Live Media are by far the most popular formats to download Fedora in amongst readers of this blog.

Based on these results, it seemed to be that the Fedora website is the primary place folks seek to download Fedora, and the more familar/technical users do have a wide range of requirements as to which Fedora they’d like to download and how they’d like to download it. Their needs won’t be met by a single download button. So we decided to split get.fedoraproject.org out into two main sections:

The first section would be presented by default, and would be aimed at fulfilling the Board’s requirements.

The second section would be accessible by links on the default page, and would provide an ala carte experience for more particular Fedora downloaders.

This redesign launched with Fedora 13’s release this past May. How well did it work? Well. 🙂 There were some (ahem) torrential discussions following its launch, which I’ll detail in a follow-up blog post I’ll call the get.fpo postmortem. 🙂

So there you have it

In summary, we’ve been following a 3-phase approach to the http://fedoraproject.org design process, and we’re currently working towards the third phase with our eye on F14’s release for the next launch.

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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.